Friday 12 July 2019

`Photograph` reviewed



`Photograph` directed by Ritesh Batra had its London premiere on Saturday 29 June as the closing night gala event of the 2019 London Indian Film Festival. I was drawn to it because of Batra`s previous success with `The Lunchbox` (reviewed on this blog at http://ramnikshah.blogspot.com/2014/04/) which had brought him universal acclaim. Since then he has consolidated his fame internationally with films such as `Our Souls at Night`, starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford, and `The Sense of an Ending` (based on a novel by Julian Barnes, which I had lauded in my 2011 Annual Review at http://ramnikshah.blogspot.com/2011/) also with top British actors. So his directorial credentials are well established.  For `Photograph` he returned to his Indian roots and a desi tale and landscape in every sense.  I however found it disappointing.

According to the programme notes, what Batra wanted was to move away from the typical Bollywood fare of “plucky heroines who defy tradition and family” while being “mindlessly pursued” by presumably vacuous men and who indulge in their youthful shenanigans with “a goofy group of friends”, to create  “an independent arthouse film” depicting “a very real story about people living in Mumbai of today”.  So what is it about?

The photograph of the title is the result of a chance encounter between “Rafi, a Muslim villager living in the city trying to scratch out a living as a street photographer” and “Miloni, a shy and traditionally raised middle-class Mumbaikar”.  That happens when Miloni is dreamily walking through the crowds around the Gateway of India, having apparently disembarked from a ferry, and Rafi accosts her with his pitch to have her picture taken.  She reluctantly agrees; he takes a succession of shots as professional photographers do and while he is busy processing them she decamps and so he is literally left holding the photograph! 

Then we learn about their back stories.  She appears to be in her early 20s, a graduate student doing a training course for the chartered accountancy profession, who lives at home with her family – parents and a younger brother – and a live-in cook servant.  He on the other hand has no domestic life as such, living as he does in a communal setting with a group of single men, all from the same ethnic/religious background.  But he does have a close relationship with his grandmother, back in their distant ancestral village, who had brought him and his siblings up after their parents early demise and who continues to remain a strong, even controlling, influence, constantly urging him to find someone to marry.  Most of his daily conversations with his after-work companions, as well as phone/text exchanges with his grandmother, revolve around his marriage prospects, with much leg-pulling and banter.

Left holding the unclaimed photograph of Miloni, he decides to use it to tell his grandmother and his friends that she is the one whom he has chosen to marry and from there on the story takes on a surreal dimension as he builds an imaginary scenario and persuades Miloni (when they subsequently meet again, more about which later) to go along with that.

Miloni is indeed the proverbial dutiful, docile daughter who does what she is told or expected to do.  Very early on we see her trying on an item of clothing in a fashion store and to accept it without question when suggested by an elder.  The few home scenes are mostly of the family at the dinner table, with very few close-ups. Miloni remains largely silent or monosyllabic when asked some question by her father.  At one point, her little sibling even makes a witty remark, but the mother rarely features in any of their interactions.  And the daily evening ritual ends with Miloni seen diligently engrossed in her `home work`, fussed over like an adolescent by the diligent cook maid.  

As in `The Lunchbox` and `Our Soles at Night`, and even `The Sense of an Ending`, so in `Photograph` the underlying theme is of how the fate of two strangers, from entirely different backgrounds, whose paths are otherwise unlikely to cross, becomes intertwined by fortuitous circumstances which propel them towards a meeting of minds.  There is nothing wrong with that hallowed formula  Here the narrative is driven by the poetry of imagination rather than anything else, for in the real world such a construct would be fraught with imponderables.

Is `Photograph` then “a very real story about people living in Mumbai today”?  In these days of the digital camera, smartphones and selfies, all of which are found in abundance in India, and in particular in the megacity metropolis of Mumbai, do street photographers ply their trade in the way we see in the film?  Maybe they do but would a young woman of Miloni`s education and social status have got caught up in a commercial photo-op like that?  We know that she did, for reasons of her own inner insecurity.  Fair enough, but then she ran off and in getting to the sequel to it there is no footage of her reflecting on what had happened.Indeed, throughout she is presented as a silent brooding introvert, whose private thoughts and feelings are shrouded in a mist of mystery.

And Batra also seems to have made a deliberate decision to underplay what would cinematically have been a dramatic moment of the two of them meeting again.  In fact that part and what would have passed between them is glossed over completely, for what we see when they are next shown together is him briefing her about the imminent arrival on the scene of his grandmother and what she should be told about how they met.  As to why Miloni is so willing to play along with the deception, again we are left to guess. 

And then the pace of the movie gathers momentum.  We see a lot more of the grandmother with Rafi alone and with him and Miloni, eating out, shopping and talking over several days. She even presses Miloni to accept a gift, as a token of what she thinks is going to be her and Rafi`s union.  On one of their outings together, Miloni`s family maid sees her with Rafi posing for a photograph on a beach.  At home, during their post-dinner nightly routine, Miloni tells the maid Rafi was not her boyfriend; the maid is sympathetic and assures her the secret was safe with her.  And as an aside, Miloni expresses a desire to visit the maid`s home village to see how her folks live, to the latter`s obvious delight. That is not the only glimpse we get of her mental state.  Another is when, while she and Rafi are out and about late one evening on a bus, we see her reaching out to him and the two of them sit together gingerly touching hands.  The grandmother eventually susses out that Miloni is not what she has been made out to be and tells Rafi what she thinks of it.

How was it that a `traditionally raised middle-class` Mumbai girl could spend so much time away from home, other than at college, stretching into evenings, without being asked about what she might have been doing and where?  Unlike Rafi, she did not have any friends of her age. What she told the maid about Rafi not being her boyfriend hardly counted as sharing confidences with someone of her own ilk. She had no social life; she was a loner – and essentially lonesome and possibly bored.  That explained why she got drawn into a contrived situation with Rafi, despite everything that set them apart.  He was noticeably older, more mature and worldly, though inexperienced in male-female dynamics.  The programme notes mentioned “differences in their religious, economic and cultural backgrounds, and even skin colour”! Desi Indian preoccupation with colour notwithstanding, as far as I was concerned they both had the same shade of light brown complexion on the cinema screen!  And then there were the classroom scenes of accountancy students during lectures.  These were simply unbelievable. Even our ten year olds would not be subjected to the kind of didactic teaching and discipline, not to mention meek passivity with which it was received, that we saw there.

To be fair, the whole match-making episode and the predatory lecturer`s crude attempt to woo Miloni were a realistic representation of true-life situations, but these were outweighed by the other factors.  The movie could have been better served by spirited performances of the two principal characters. Their deadpan acting and lack of animation generally did nothing to convey the nuances and subtleties of their emotions and did not engage the viewer.  This could be because, according to the film`s credits, there was no singular script writer, only a script supervisor, and that might have affected the direction.    

All of this marred what would otherwise have been a classic tale of two young or relatively young people bravely moving away from the limitations of their society`s norms and their own constricted lives to experience the stirrings of romance.  True, this is not a Bollywood style extravaganza, but even for an independent arthouse film there is something to be said for verisimilitude.  Chance encounters between unlikely people happen all the time in all societies and are the stuff of creative fiction in literature and other forms of art.  In this film however while we could understand why Rafi fell for her, it was difficult to figure out what she saw in him, given all the basic differences between them?  But that of course was the essence of the artistic conundrum.

RAMNIK SHAH
© 2019
England, Surrey